(One drop at a time.) My journal entries about offering copies of the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and other LDS church books, mainly to immigrants in their native language, mainly in Indianapolis, Indiana. With 106 translations, the Book of Mormon (along with the Bible) is a good "Rosetta Stone" for learning English or other languages, in addition to being a missionary tool.

My goals in keeping this blog/journal are: to encourage others to offer people copies of the Book
of Mormon and the Bible, to illustrate the incredible number of recent immigrants who are eager
for bilingual material, to illustrate the ease of encountering them and offering them material,
and to make known the wonderful deeds of the Lord (Ps 105:1, Isa 12:4) in arranging many of these
encounters. I realize that the concept of offering foreign language books to strangers is just
plain weird to many people, so here are some hints if you are intrigued by this and wish to try it.
Respectful comments and constructive criticism are invited.

The goal of the book placement effort is to provide, in a friendly non-threatening way, gospel
material to someone who is willing to receive it in their native language and English.

To the recipients of these books who read this: I thank you again for allowing me
to be of service to you. I encourage you to read the material, and pray to God that He
confirm the truth of it to you. The Bible and the Book of Mormon are both the Word of God.
Living according to their teachings brings happiness.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Hindi, Gujerati at gas station. Thu, Feb 1, 2007.

02/01/2007. 788. On the way home from a friends house I stopped at a gas station I hadn't been to before to buy a newspaper. (This was the first time I'd been to this friend's house since moving, so this was a new route for me to travel.) The cashier seemed middle eastern. I asked him if spoke Hindi, and he said yes. I asked if he spoke any other languages, and he said Gujerati.

I said I'd like to give him a free book in Hindi from my church, and a free Bible in Gujerati. He indicated okay. So I went out to the car and retrieved Hindi and English copies of the Book of Mormon, and a Gujerati Bible.

I went back in and presented them, and he accepted them. He was at first reluctant to accept the English Book of Mormon as he didn't read English very well. But when I illustrated the parallel concept, reading and pointing to 1 Nephi 1:1 from both editions, he seemed to catch on to the ESL aspect.

2 Comments:

Does the Church have any materials in Gujerati yet? On my mission we taught a man running a motel who spoke Gujerati. I spoke to someone at the Church seeing if they had anything and he said they were working on it. We gave him the Hindi, since he understood that too, just not as well. So do they have anything all these years later? The JS pamphlet maybe?